#we could do some really cool celestial object analogies here probably | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

starglowwos · 5 months

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canary curse things. thinking about canary curse things

i'm hesitant to say the canary curse has been broken—what, no, of course it has been, jimmy died second instead of first, and the canary curse is all about dying first— okay hear me out i swear i make sense

my thought is that patterns can change. patterns aren't always static ones. just because something new happened this time around doesn't mean the pattern's been broken, it may have just changed its rules a bit.

joel had a pattern of having no true allies up until double or limited life, where it instead became a pattern of being isolated, for example

now, before we get into the canary curse specifically, let's talk about some other patterns

scott and martyn tend to drag themselves as well as their allies up the leaderboard. they both tend to outlive their allies. grian tends to kill his allies. ...i feel like i should put more here but that's all i can think of right now

now, the way i see it, is scott, martyn, and jimmy in particular all have some sort of weight to them. positive meaning they drag themselves and their allies up the leaderboard, negative meaning the opposite. scott and martyn have a positive weight, whereas jimmy has a negative one.

what i think's happened here is that martyn and jimmy's weights have tugged on each other, and as a result, martyn turned yellow and red first instead of much later on, and jimmy died second instead of first.

jimmy's pull is strong, i think, and so he tends to die first every time. just because he tends to die first every time doesn't make that a rule, though - it just makes it a pattern, one that's been broken. the pattern that hasn't been broken, though, is jimmy being one of the earliest to die, and jimmy dragging his allies down the leaderboard with him.

jimmy died first in 3rd life, and dragged scott down to 10th, and scott finally turned yellow right before jimmy died. jimmy died first in last life, and dragged mumbo down with him, and they were a similar color pretty much the whole time. jimmy died first in double life, and dragged tango down with him. jimmy died first in limited life, and joel died quickly after. jimmy died second in secret life, and dragged martyn's color down with him.

martyn, though, doesn't die yet, because of his positive weight. he's often tugged further up the leaderboard, and so while jimmy may drag his color down and martyn ends up first yellow and red, martyn still manages to stay afloat.

martyn is stubborn is the thing, lmao. he stays alive out of spite and just because he wants to, and so he does, and he makes sure he does. now that the stakes are higher and one wrong move could mean losing everything, he's being a lot more careful than he was earlier on.

and let me just reiterate for a second - he's stubborn. once he's got an idea, he's locked onto that idea until he gets it done or literally can't anymore. martyn will drive himself up the wall before he gives up on something and even then he'll need convincing or more likely a distraction. he didn't give up on ren in third life til he died and couldn't do anything anymore. he didn't give up on trying to kill scott in last life til he died and couldn't do anything anymore. he didn't give up on getting a diamond chestplate in secret life until he got it despite how much it cost him in the end. outside the life series, even, i'm rewatching rats right now- martyn will try to climb a wall over and over and over until he gets it or something gets in the way. he'll be texturing a model and complain to chat about how painful it is and still decide to spend the next hour and a half getting the damn thing done even though he should've logged off for bedtime 2 hours ago. (yes martyn i am calling you out, enjoy)

and so martyn doesn't die! he's yellow first, he's red first, and all other red names die, but martyn doesn't. because yeah, maybe he's impulsive, but he's in this for himself and himself alone and there's no way in hell he's dealing with a wither and a warden that's just killed three people. (he did try and steal the kill though. martyn do you remember what happened last time you tried to steal the kill, you fell into the void and died)

jimmy isn't as stubborn. jimmy's a lot more forgiving, a lot more lenient, and as much as he's being more aggressive this season, he's reckless about it and impulsive and his reputation isn't helping him here.

jimmy lets things happen to him. as upset as he might act about it, he never actually does anything about it, and it gets him killed. he's afraid to break the rules, he's afraid to make people uncomfortable or upset or hurt, he starts genuinely tearing up at the thought of pulling a bait and switch on skizz, and that's the kind of thing martyn does on a daily basis lmao

jimmy is forgiving and passive, martyn and scott don't forget so easily and aren't afraid to make people upset, grian's somewhere in between.

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ileolai · 5 years

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[this context is probably important so i reccommend reading it first.]

More thoughts about the differences in Aziraphale / Crowley's personal spaces in the book vs the show, because the way they are both illustrated serves different purposes in their journeys, I think.

and of course

so In the book, Aziraphale is outwardly polite but aggressively gaurds his little sanctum of misprinted Bibles and what-not from human people. If he absolutely has to, he'll reluctantly sell the books. ''Second hand book dealer'' is explicitly described as a cover-- an external image-- and the bookshop is mostly a big vault to store his valuable informations. This is, I suppose, how you would illustrate a celestial analogy for a Cold War rogue agent.

But in the tv show, Aziraphale’s story is less about that and more specifically about his emotional relationship to Crowley, to which his humanity, and his aspiration to be more human [previous meta] is a core factor. So the bookshop is more like a home, it's domestic and cozy, and the place he is absolutely at peace, his personal refuge.

and it's not just a disguise, or a vault, the bookshop IS Aziraphale, yes? A sort of outward reflection of himself and his internal world. All those scattered books and papers, the artwork that is ¡specifically! depicting the temptation of Eve, etc-- those are his memories he chooses to keep, his experiences, little pieces of himself. Same with Crowley -- in the book his apartment is about how he constructs his external self-image, it's mostly full of Real Actual Cool Person Stuff that he doesn't actually care about or even interact with, aside from the plants. But in the tv show it's about his internal world, and it's large and cold and spare and hardly a-real-human-persons’-apartment-like. Apart from being these Jungian reflections of their internal selves, the bookshop and the apartment are also the liminal spaces where their important decisions to move forward are made. Aziraphale finally severs his connection to Heaven completely in the bookshop, and Crowley in his ep. 4 extended panic attack repeatedly retreats to and emerges from his apartment, first deciding to run away, and then to murder Hastur and Ligur, etc. But I wanna focus on Crowley here, i’ve wrote reams about Aziraphale already- So Crowley's internal world, very unlike Aziraphale's, is all very boxed in and inaccessible-- the Garden Of Re-traumatizing Myself is in one concrete shrouded box, and the Probably A Wank Fantasy statue is in another box, and the bird statue is in its own little box, and they're all walled off from each other with little to no direct line of sight. And they’re sentimental objects or things specific to Crowley’s character, as opposed to Really Cool Actual Human Person stuff. And there appears to be no visible door in at first [until Hastur kicks it in], unlike Aziraphale’s shop. it just looks like a bunch of transitional hallways and no actual rooms. There’s almost nowhere to settle and say, appreciate your Wank Fantasy Statue, it’s just in this dimly lit claustrophobic little space. A good analogy for Crowley’s fractured / wandering thinking, these hallways.

everything is drawn and shuttered and closed off and dark, but especially during his extended freak-out episode when he is hurt by Aziraphale / having an existential crisis / having some kind of emotional flashback to the Fall / yelling at God all at once [because... shoving your emotions in little boxes doesn’t really... work... ever...]

So here’s one of my favourite little things and a good illustration of how this thing is laid out like a palatial memory space, i think. Immediately after his first attempt at dragging Aziraphale away fails, they break up, and he is considering abandoning the place on his own and hollering at God about it all, the Remember When We Killed Some Nazis In A Church bird statue is sort of hovering there in the background, just out of sight.

But the second time he goes back to his apartment-- which is when he decides to murder someone for his and Aziraphale’s sake again-- it’s looming right over him, and he enters from that space.

Ooh.

Back to his existential Why God Why freak out for a moment-- here he’s looking at the globe, but he’s not actually seeing anything of the actual world outside, right? He’s shut off, shut down and angry. And he bats this thing away-- but it returns, like an annoying thought-- bc as I talked abt in my previous meta, he is much more ambivalent to the Earth than Aziraphale.

Until. UNTIL. This is important! He opens the safe on the second round.

NOW those shutters are open again, and the place is lit up.

Because this is abt opening the most locked-down and guarded part of himself... and the thing which represents Aziraphale's committment to him... opens up everything else, yes? And what he is doing in that moment, is making the commitment to go back to Aziraphale again, even though he was hurt twice-- and in a way he can never walk back from again, bc he’s about to murder someone to do it.

So there's a whole lot more I could go into about why murdering Ligur but failing to kill Hastur is specifically important, why making this tremendous effort at vulnerability and being thwarted by the bookshop burning is what pushes him to the edge of giving up where book!Crowley didn't, etc. but the point I wanna get to is this--

It is only -after- all this, opening the shutters on his internal world and accessing that memory of Aziraphale's committment to him, going back to him, and finding his humanity and value for the world, that Crowley invites Aziraphale back to his apartment for the first time. Shows him all of himself that he keeps locked away, which is essential for them to pull off the swap at the end. He has apparently kept himself walled off and emotionally inaccessible since 1967, until he blurted it all out with ‘’we can run away together?’’ and spent the rest of the episode in frantic damage control.

So I would say it's not Aziraphale who needs to learn how to emotionally reciprocate, yes? Aziraphale made his can’t-walk-this-back committment in 1967 when he stole what is, effectively, the celestial equivalent of weapons grade plutonium. And his own world is always open to Crowley-- Crowley knows the bookshop intimately, and is more comfortable being there than in his own head.

Crowley is kind and generous and loving-- and it’s not that he doesn’t know how he feels-- but returning that level of vulnerability and Being Known is terrifying for him, I think, and he has to face down that terror before he can, has to know he can survive it.

#gettin jungian in this hizzy #good omens #meta #crowley #long post

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